We’ve been in the content industry for over a decade now. From our early days of running the Ministry of Funny Youtube channel to making TV shows like She’s a Terrorist and I Love Her, and more recently launching our Yah Lah But podcast, we’ve loved telling stories through a whole bunch of different mediums. Through this journey, we’ve seen the content industry evolve and thanks to technology, today the possibilities are endless. As a simple example, when we started on YouTube, we thought it was going to be THE platform for content. Then came Facebook videos. And Instagram, TikTok, podcasts (and the list goes on).
So as we were thinking about the future, and what we wanted to be doing in the years to come, there were 2 big themes that came up - Stories and Audio. Let us explain.
Stories
We believe that every person has a unique perspective to tell. They might find it hard to articulate, but they each have a story. What motivates us to build Folklory is our belief that these stories are powerful and can help us understand and appreciate one another. They can help us widen our perspective and learn from experiences. This isn’t something new though. Books, videos, photo albums - they’ve been doing exactly this for thousands of years ever since our ancestors first gathered around fires and started the time-honored tradition of capturing their own folklore for future generations.
Now there are better ways to do this, and this brings us to the second theme.
Audio
Unlike text and video, which have seen so much innovation, we believe that we’re in the early days of the audio medium. Think of the different ways you consume text - long-form like essays and blogs, short-form like tweets. Even with video - you have the entire spectrum from full-length feature films to 7-second TikToks. But when it comes to audio, you mostly have music and podcasts - with the latter growing in popularity only in the last few years.
When you think about audio, it’s a very special medium, unlike video and text. You can consume audio passively and actively. You can listen to music in the background while working out or you can pay close attention while listening to your favorite podcast. Additionally, we’ve noticed that because you’re not looking into a screen, listening to audio allows you to imagine and visualize things - which we found very fascinating!
Having created hundreds of hours of audio podcast content which have been streamed almost 2 million times, we’ve also realized the power of audio in capturing emotion and nuance which is harder to do with text. Think of this like “body language” - listening to someone’s voice tells us much more than just the words they are speaking because audio has the ability to capture and communicate that nuance. Technology has enabled audio to be captured easier, faster, and with greater fidelity than ever before. If you can have a phone call, you can be an audio creator and it’s still the early days of what’s possible.
Putting these 2 themes together, we arrived at the idea of Folklory! 🎉
Mission #100in100 🚀
Folklory allows you to create personalized podcasts for your loved ones. It's a studio-quality audio recording of a private conversation with one of our interviewers, about something or someone you'd like to remember and preserve for the years to come.
We had launched a small pilot back in December last year and the feedback was amazing. Since then we’ve been doing more research and growing the team - and now we’re back and we’ve set ourselves a big goal - to reach 100 customers in the next 100 days! We love the idea of Folklory, but we want to see what the world thinks about it. If we can reach our goal, then it’s a sign that there are many more who would believe the same.
So do check out our website at Folklory and if you have questions or feedback, let us know in the comments below. You’ll see us talking a lot about Folklory in the weeks to come, as we try and spread the word. If you know someone who’d find this interesting, please do share it with them.
See you next week!
Haresh